16 Of The Spookiest Video Game Urban Legends

1.World of Warcraft features a children’s doomsday cult.

Occasionally, a group of children appear in a house on the edge of Crystal Lake, standing in a pentagram design. They never stray far from the building, and never break formation. They aren’t a part of any quest line, and Blizzard customer support gives no definite explanation for their presence. Some players think they’re creating a code with their pentagram movement and it’s yet to be cracked.

2.Earthbound’s final dungeon is a uterus and the final boss is a FETUS.

Nintendo

Nintendo

At the end of Earthbound, the heroes travel back in time to defeat the final boss, an intergalactic alien named Giygas, who they hope will be in a weaker form. The final dungeon eerily resembles a uterus, and the swirling backdrop of the final battle game screen looks unnervingly like a fetus. Creator Shigesato Itoi has claimed it’s all a coincidence, but the evidence is pretty convincing to the contrary.

3.Fallout 3 predicts the future, foretelling the queen’s death in 2014.

Radio stations in Fallout 3 pick up mysterious morse code transmissions, one of which predicts the future. Supposedly there’s code in the game’s script that predicts the queen’s death in 2014 and Britney Spears winning an Oscar in 2023. Oddly, this mysterious code has already accurately predicted Gary Coleman’s death as well as the gulf oil spill. It’s certainly an elaborate hoax by an intelligent fan… right?

4.Super Mario Galaxy 2 features sinister shadow people who watch you from afar.

In one level of Super Mario Galaxy 2, you can see creepy figures on the distant horizon. They’re unreachable and never referenced in-game, but the coding of the game lists them as “HellValleySkyTree.” OK, except they’re definitely not trees. So what are they? Some claim they’re part of an abandoned level, but nobody really knows.

5.Luigi’s Mansion is actually Luigi’s Post Mortem Nightmare.

Luigi’s Mansion for Gamecube features a scene where Luigi answers a phone and lightning strike, illuminating his figure against the far wall. Thing is, the shadow appears to be of Luigi hanging from the ceiling. Could that mean Luigi is actually dead and a ghost himself? It could be a glitch, but certain players believe this is a remnant from a much darker version of the game that was scrapped early.

6. Princess Daisy is a deformed freak, the poor girl.

During Princess Daisy’s victory screen in Super Smash Bros. Melee, if the player zooms in through her hair they can see a visible third eye. While this was most certainly a modeling error, it would explain why Princess Peach gets most of the attention—the only other princess around is a monster.

7.Minecraft has a creepy doppelgänger of the protagonist running around.

Some Minecraft players claim to see odd structures on their maps, such as sand pyramids in oceans and long tunnels they didn’t dig. The source of these structures, the legend says, is a strange character named Herobrine. Creator Markus Persson says Herobrine doesn’t exist, but also teases that “letting too many animals die in lava is a fool proof way to summon him, but you don’t need to be afraid of him.”

8.Pokemon Red and Green has music that makes Japanese children go nuts and jump off buildings.

Nintendo

Nintendo

Dubbed “Lavender Town Syndrome,” the urban legend claims that in 1996 a bunch of children in Japan offed themselves after playing Pokemon Red and Green because the music in the titular purple town drove them insane. Sounds fishy, but there were confirmed illnesses caused by the music, which was changed before the game was released internationally.

9. Squall is dead!!!

Square Enix

Square Enix

In Final Fantasy VIII, at the end of disc one, the main character is impaled by a huge ice lance. On disc two, he’s strangely healed and the game commences without much regard to THE GIANT ICE SHARD HE TOOK TO THE TORSO. Some fans regard the rest of the game as either a dream, or Squall’s life flashing before his eyes. It sort of makes sense, because starting with disc two the game gets WEIRD.

10. Aerith isn’t dead!!!

Square Enix

Square Enix

There’s a key moment in Final Fantasy VII when Aerith is stabbed by the main villain and supposedly dies. However, theres a theory on Tumblr that the sword didn’t kill her, just damaged organs and caused spinal damage, paralyzing her. After all, there’s no bloodshed. When Cloud, the game’s hero, lays her to rest in the water, but if she was alive and simply motionless, does that mean Cloud was the real murderer? Probably not, but it’s possible.

11.Donkey Kong got it’s name through a translating error.

Not very spooky, but still fun: at some point a rumor started, alleging that a translation error caused “monkey” to become “donkey,” explaining the odd titling of Nintendo’s early hit. Sounds plausible, but producer Shigeru Miyamoto says it was intentional, and he was trying to come up with a name that reflected the stubbornness of the titular character. Likely story, Miyamoto. Likely story.

12. There’s a haunted copy of Zelda: Majora’s Mask out there.

A user on 4Chan (of course) posted a story claiming he found a blank cartridge of Majora’s Mask, which already had a save file called “Ben.” He tried to start his own game, but the gameplay was erratic and strange. It got worse, his character would die over and over, and he’d be met with the message, “You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?” Creepy.

13. Grand Theft Yeti.

So pervasive was the rumor that Bigfoot appeared in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that Rockstar co-founder Terry Donovan had to affirm the notion as a hoax, saying that “just like in real life, there is no Bigfoot” in San Andreas. Except everyone knows that Bigfoot exists in real life, soooooo….

14.Berzerk is cursed and kills teens.

Stern Electronics

Stern Electronics

1980’s Berserk has the distinction of being the first game related to the death of player, when 19-year-old Jeff Dailey died of heart failure soon after achieving a score of 16,660. The following year, 18-year-old Peter Burkowski made the Berzerk top-ten list twice in fifteen minutes, then stepped away from the machine and collapsed. Both deaths were ruled as heart attacks.

15. There’s a secret character in Street Fighter II named Sheng Long.

In February of 1992, Electronic Gaming Monthly published an April Fools joke a bout a secret character, whose name had accidentally been included in the game through a mistranslation. Because they published an April Fools joke in friggin’ February, it was taken as fact and reprinted by numerous other publications. The hoax became so widespread that he was even mentioned in the seminal classic Street Fighter: The Movie.

16.Polybius wasn’t even a game, it was a horrifying government experiment.

The iconic legend of Polybius chronicles the mysterious appearance of a new, unheard of game in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon in 1981. Players claimed to experience amnesia, blackouts, seizures, headaches, nausea, night terrors, and there were even alleged reports of suicide. Some swore they saw a mysterious man in black collecting data from the machines. Eventually, the game vanished from arcades, though alleged photos of vintage cabinets appear on the internet from time to time, but no definitive proof of the game ever truly existing has ever surfaced—probably because the evil government covered its tracks.